GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 336473
gnome-pilot needs to be ported to new udev world order
Last modified: 2006-04-18 17:11:53 UTC
Forwarded from: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gnome-pilot/+bug/25653 /proc/bus/usb is deprecated. The USB devices are now managed with udev, and thus /dev/bus/usb (which should be fully compatible) should be used. It additionally scans /proc/bus/usb/devices. Thus, the visor_devices_timeout() function needs to be rewritten to parse sysfs instead to find out about devices; or even better, use /dev/tty* instead of the raw devices. Suggested patch: http://librarian.launchpad.net/1841465/gpilotd_sysfs.diff.gz
Many thanks for this patch. I'd stumbled across the patch while helping diagnose the missing usbfs issue for some ubuntu users, and put it on my todo list. It looks likely that the next release of gnome-pilot will offer HAL/DBUS support, which will avoid the use of usbfs. The above sysfs patch is likely to be used as a compile-time option if a suitable HAL/DBUS environment is not available.
I've added a modified version of the patch to the gnome-pilot CVS. The options for finding a USB device are now, in order of preference: 1. HAL/DBUS. This is a compile-time option, used by default if a compatible hal/dbus environment is found. 2. sysfs (/sys/bus/usb/devices/), with thanks to Ubuntu patch contribution. 3. usbfs (/proc/bus/usb/devices), legacy fallback, to support 2.4 kernels. In cases 2 and 3, the configuration applet will complain if an attempt is made to create a USB device and sysfs and usbfs are both missing.
Update: the HAL/DBUS support in CVS is still experimental. It seems that the palm/pda rules supplied with libhal are not able to match robustly. For one thing, they require the visor module, which is likely to be unnecessary once pilot-link 0.12. with libusb support is released and working well. Secondly, at least on my fc5 system, the match rules had trouble matching the usbserial device - perhaps due to slowness in the creation of the devices. So, CVS may change, so that the HAL callback just matches on USB vendor/product IDs from devices.xml.
Will this be released as a tarball anytime soon?
I expect so. As recently announced on gnome-pilot-list, there is an unofficial pre-release tarball available at: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mcdavey/downloads/ This pre-release tarball is basically CVS, plus a couple of HAL tweaks I haven't had time to commit yet. It should basically work with HAL now. Further pre-releases / releases will be announced on gnome-pilot list.
How confident are you in the release? I'd love to build test packages for our users to consider the release for Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper release on June 1st. I don't have any hardware myself, but I'm happy to trust your and our users' statements on this. It's just that we'd need starting testing soon.
I think the pre-release tarball is pretty good (i.e. fixes the blocker bugs on dapper). More testers would be great, as all pda developers suffer from lack of hardware - the variety of (mis)behaviour across palmos versions / devices / usb hardware, etc. etc. makes testing hard. What's your timetable? I need to talk to the gp maintainer about getting an official release / tarball out. I don't have much that has to get done before that: just to commit a couple of changes that arose from a couple of testers reports. Assuming that's all okay, a release might be done by next week. How does that sound?
Next week sounds awesome - we're currently in Beta Freeze, which will go out (if all goes well) on Thursday, after that, I'm happy to create test packages on all relevant architectures and call for testers.